James Arthur Peters (July 13, 1922 – December 18, 1972) was an American herpetologists and zoogeographer. He was born in Durant, Iowa; raised in Greenup, Illinois. He studied at the University of Michigan and obtained his Ph.D. in biology in 1952. He studied with the herpetologist Norman Edouard Hartweg. His main subject of research was herpetology and zoogeography of Latin America, especially Ecuador. During his thirty years of research in herpetology he described seventeen new species or subspecies, most of them amphibians, such as a few neotropical toads of the genus Atelopus.